lighting/environment portfolio

Penetralia

Hello all,
I've been lurking on this forum for a bit but decided to start actually posting now.
GDC is coming up so I'm trying to get more portfolio pieces in. I will be posting the wips of those here.
I've done a lot of lighting but I'd like to try and bulk up my environments too, so any advice would help.

http://www.inkboxx.com

DWalker

I find navigating on your site a bit difficult - the secondary scroll bar for the gallery isn't always visible. You might want to change to a format that doesn't require 3 scroll bars on a standard display.

In your bridge environment, the steel arches seem very polygonal - they really should have more sides considering their size and importance. Also, neither the electrical poles nor the lamp posts match those from the reference images.

When using assets from another artist, you should try to link to that artist's portfolio/website, and possibly directly to their version of the model.

In many of your pieces in the personal section, you seem to have gone a bit overboard with the wear, dirt, and rust. A little weathering carefully placed is often more realistic and effective than global grunge. (Fallout 3 gets somewhat of a pass here, since they did drop more than a few nukes, but even in that environment they went overboard a bit...)

The lighting in the artists studio seems too uniformly bright; even those parts in deep shadow are fairly bright.

Penetralia

thanks,
I will try to find links to the artist's pages for the assets. Both of the assets were practice tests (the room was from a cg challenge #25 artistry) and the other asset was a practice I did at work. I will see if he has the model up on his blog.
Also thanks for pointing out the scrollbar thing, didn't catch that.
I will probably take down the artist's studio one and see if I can rework the other old room, that piece is pretty ancient now.
As for the grunge, were you talking about the props, environments, or both?

The bridge is a work in progress, I should probably take it down since it's changed a lot since then and I'm almost finished with that actual environment.

DWalker

Primarily the environments - the one with the metal door and the classroom. Even after a quarter of a century, this room isn't as dirty as the classroom:


It might just be the predominance of brown in both images.

In the props, only the ammo can seems to have gone a bit overboard, but that's largely a matter of personal taste. The rust seems a bit too uniform, not necessarily appearing where water is likely to have gathered.

Eric Chadwick

The work looks good! I especially love the Dead Space 3 lighting.

I personally dislike frames as a way to navigate. You've hidden the scroll bars, so the only way I could scroll is by using my middle mouse button/wheel, but not everyone uses a middle mouse button. CSS is better for website layout.

The menu takes a lot of clicks to see the artwork, which is kind of a drag. If you can shorten the path that would be awesome. "Your Portfolio Repels Jobs" is worth a read. http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryPortfolio

Looks like "Modern Warefare" is misspelled in your menu.

What work did you do in each project? A little text at the top would help a lot. "Environments" doesn't really help me understand what you did. Does this mean you did all the level design, all the modeling, all the texturing, all the lighting, and all the optimization/integration work? A note about the software you used would be great too, including 3d, 2d, and which engine. Employers want to know this stuff.

I don't think you need to link to the other artists' websites. I think their names are enough.

Work looks great! It's just the presentation I think.
My 2 cents.

cmc444

Im diggin it. The only thing that seems a bit strange is the updates part. I know its good to make sure people know you are updating often but maybe its better shown through work or have that update section somewhere else than on every page in that spot.

Penetralia

lol shit i didnt even realize i misspelled modern warfare. fail.
I'll try and narrow down the clicks, the iframe that the content is in is probably not helping. Thanks guys!

I was a world builder for mw3 so what I did is kind of all over the place, I did textures and models and depending on the area of the level you're in, it could be a mix of my work and other people's. I'll see if I can find a way to specify per screenshot.

Eric Chadwick

I did it per screenshot. Tried to keep it as short as possible. For example
http://ericchadwick.com/img/env_mmo_worldbuilding.html#treevillage

Another polycounter did it with rollovers. I'll see if I can find it...

Eric Chadwick

Ah yeah, it was Joshua Stubbles. Cool technique.
http://www.ivassago.com/amalfi.htm

Penetralia

oh hey I really like what you did with your screenshots, where you kind of 'mask out' parts of the screenshot so what you did is visible.
I think I might try and do that!
However another thing is there are a number of parts in the level I worked on where I did spin offs of textures or there are decals that are not my textures blended with ones I did create. so for example I used the original texture as a base but then modified the diffuse. or I took a model that was already created then changed the texture and modified the geometry and made a spin off.
I think this mostly applies for the buildings I worked on so doing something like you did for yours should work.
That was really helpful by the way!

Eric Chadwick

Cool! Actually the racing shots are from Joshua's website, not mine.

AmbiguousPackage

I think it would flow a lot better if your site loaded to your most current work from the start. It's a lot of clicking to go though and waiting for fancy menus to expand.

I also think resume and contact could be made into the same link they are very similar elements that could go together to save on clicks to navigate.

Penetralia

in my personal section, my most current is at the top- I've removed one of the oldest works.
I do like the separation between my personal and professional work rather than just having all of it dumped on one page. I can move deadspace 3 so it's the first item rather than mw3, but that seems like a minor detail imo.
I think I'll simplify the fancy menus so my personal work is just one click. the contact section I feel is ok to stay on its own. I may just have it as a direct link to my email or linkedin rather than two separate links.
I like the fact that I have a menu always accessible even when you scroll through the work which is the reason why I have frames. I think what I will do is kill the iframe and just divide the page as two frames. That will hopefully kill the multiple scrollbar issue.

Eric Chadwick

With CSS you can create floating menus that are always visible. A bit more setup time, but easier for the user to navigate your site.

Frames cause other problems too, like links loading in the frame instead of in the window.

PredatorGSR

Also, it helps if your site works on phones and ipads too, a lot of time I'll be talking to people at lunch or whatever and they can pull up my site on their phone because it is just a stream of images. I can't image what will happen to frames on a phone, I would avoid them as much as possible.